Conventionally, there is known an electronic musical instrument for generating music sounds according to performer's operation. In general, such an instrument is modeled on, e.g., piano, and designed to be operated similarly to a natural piano instrument. Therefore, some level of skill is needed to play the instrument and a long time is required to acquire proficiency in playing it.
In recent years, however, there is a demand that a performer unfamiliar with operating a musical instrument should be permitted to play pieces of music. Also, there is a demand that not only a performer can enjoy playing music, but also many performers can participate in and achieve an ensemble performance.
To this end, there has been proposed in, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2000-276141, an electronic musical instrument enabling a plurality of users unfamiliar with playing a musical instrument to participate in playing music.
With this electronic musical instrument, users are enabled to implement an ensemble performance by making some easy actions (such as waving their hands). With this instrument, performance information for one piece of music is transmitted in advance to slave units (operator units) connected to a base unit, and performance parts are respectively assigned by the base unit to the slave units in accordance with assignment instruction data recorded in a floppy disk. After the performance information being transmitted from the base unit to the slave units, the performance parts transmitted can each be played by only the slave unit associated therewith.
Each slave unit user plays a performance in time with a demonstrative performance by the base unit. On the other hand, in a case where a plurality of users (participants) perform rehabilitation or other activity together, they are often divided into groups each consisting of a predetermined number of performers (about five performers, for example) including a facilitator (guide) who guides other participants. With the above described electronic musical instrument, a performance cannot be played in time with an exemplary human performance and an exemplary performance cannot be performed by the facilitator.
An object of the present invention is to provide an ensemble system with which performance parts can easily and flexibly be assigned between a facilitator and participants.